CSU Hayward is History

My graduate alma mater was known during various times as Lowell Tech, Lowell State College, University of Lowell, and now University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

The bookstore offers shirts & other merchandise with all the names available. Apparently, the alums who graduated under the different names want to buy stuff with that name.

So, I would advise CSU-East Bay to avoid a fire sale of Hayward stuff for the time being.

 

Agreed, but when a school offers no graduate programs at all, I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it a university.

 

Perhaps, but it could be that some institutions adopt the "university" name to avoid being mistaken for a community college.

Tony

 

I think that they treat transfers from the other system pretty much the same as they treat transfers from any other RA university. In other words, students have to apply for admission as a transfer student and meet whatever curricular or GPA requirements are in place.

I have no personal experience with the UC system. I'd guess that intra-system transfers might be harder there than with CSU, because some of the UC's are prestige schools in high demand but with limited places. In other words, I expect that it's easier to transfer into UC Riverside than into UC Berkeley.

In the CSU system, transfers are relatively easy. (Except into a few high-demand schools like Cal Poly SLO.) Students have to apply for admission to their new school as transfer students, but as long as they were in good academic standing at another CSU, that's usually no problem. The biggest thing is evaluations. The various CSU's have somewhat different curricular requirements and different course offerings, and the new school has to decide how the previous work equates to the courses specified on the new syllabus. Transfers sometimes lose credits.

One thing that the CSU's have is a liberal policy of letting students enrolled at one CSU take courses as guests at other CSU's. That's different from transferring since the student remains a student at the first CSU and the original school ultimately grants the degree. In these cases the whole thing is streamlined and there's no admissions process involved.

One big difference between the UC and CSU systems is that the CSU (emphatically unlike UC) is interested in opening up their offerings to the community.

For example, CSU has a fantastic program that they call 'Open University'. This allows members of the general public who don't have a degree objective to enroll in CSU classes on a space-available basis, for credit, without ever applying to the university. All people have to do is just show up for the first meeting of a class, get the professor to sign the open university form (course prerequisites have to be met), then pay a fee in the administration building. That's it. They are in. It works for graduate seminars, everything. (Again, normal course prerequisites have to be met.)

I mean, where else can you walk in off the street and learn to read Egyptian heiroglyphs? (You can at San Francisco State.) Many Silicon Valley engineers take advanced San Jose State engineering classes this easy way in order to stay current with new developments.

The University of California would have a heart attack at the very thought of letting riff-raff (like me) into their classes so freely.

Another example of the difference between the two systems: The University of California restricts access to their university libraries to their own students, staff and approved researchers from other institutions. Compare that to San Jose State, which recently opened a huge new library facility on their campus that combines the SJSU university library collection with the San Jose Public Library's main-branch collection. Together they represent quite an information resource, and they actively welcome the public to come and use it. There's an attractive cafe staffed by SJSU students and everything.

UC gets apoplexy just thinking about that.

 

Saturday's Oaktown Tribune has a story on CSU Hayw... oops, CSU East Bay's bookstore, getting its first shipment of CSUEB sweatshirts and stuff. Now they have racks of CSUH stuff on one side, and CSUEB stuff on the other.

I was concerned that the bookstore would be stuck with all that defunct 'Hayward' merchandise. But it seems that it's suddenly a very hot commodity.

"Bookstore manager Sandra Ehrhorn said sweatshirt sales from Feb. 1 through Friday were up 466 percent from the same period last year; Cal State Hayward T-shirts flew off the racks at nearly 10 times last year's rate."

"Ehrhorn said the bookstore will continue to order CSUH merchandise as long as the demand keeps up."

It actually sounds like students are wearing Hayward stuff as an act of defiance.

The story interviews a woman who bought a CSUEB T-shirt. "Since it's already been changed, I might as well be proud of it." But she folded her purchase so that the letters didn't show, saying, "So many people are against it, I was like, 'I'd better hide this'."

 

In the Middle Ages, a university was a school that offered doctorates in law, medicine, and theology. As Harold Parker was fond of noting, by that standard, Colorado has no true universities because the University of Colorado does not offer the doctor of theology and the University of Denver does not offer the doctor of medicine.

 

In the Middle Ages, a university was a school that offered doctorates in law, medicine, and theology. As Harold Parker was fond of noting, by that standard, Colorado has no true universities because the University of Colorado does not offer the doctor of theology and the University of Denver does not offer the doctor of medicine.

 

Agreed, and when a school like Bryn Mawr offers doctorates from day one, it is a bit of a stretch to call it merely a college.

 

Re: CSU vs. UC systems

This sort of echos Bill Dayson's earlier response.

Transfers from CSU get no special treatment when tranferring to UC. They are evaluated like any transfer student.

As Bill mentioned, transferring within UC can be difficult. UC admin are hip to students getting into, Riverside, for example, and then trying to transfer to Berkeley or UCLA. It's hard to do. Going the other direction is much easier, of course. If you look at the basic academic requirements to the UC system as a whole, they don't look that formidable. Though this is currently threatened in the light of budget cuts, the UC system has guaranteed admission to students fulfilling the entry requirements. What that means, however, is that you are guaranteed admission to "one" of the UC schools. If you apply to Berkeley and don't qualify (Berkeley's requirements are much more stringent than the basic UC requirements), then your app is handed down the line until it eventually finds a home.

Bill is right about the CSU's being generally much more student friendly. The Open University is a great feature. The UC system "used" to have a program that allowed community college students to take a couple of classes at a UC, providing their grades were high enough. I'm not sure if this program still exists, however.

I think the reason for some of the differences between CSU and UC, is that the two systems play off each other. Part of the reason UC doesn't have an Open University is because CSU does. Berkeley has no DL degree programs mainly because other schools do.

It seems that Berkeley's response to innovation can be summed up as "don't just do something, sit there." When it comes to a more open university and full DL offerings, I think they assume that by not innovating, they maintain their prestige. Who knows?